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Should self-driving cars be equipped with adjustable ethics?

Autonomous cars are piloting their way into the wide philosophical sea of ethics. Right now the autonomous cars are unaware of this because the driver's will always comes first, but when we start getting cars that can overrule commands or choose a particular ethical outcome either without or in spite of driver input, we'll have a lot of decisions to make. Which means we have a lot of decisions to start considering right now.

Patick Lin considers some of them in a piece in Wired, starting with the trolley problem - whether a person who has control of a runaway trolley should let it kill five people tied to the track without intervention, or should pull a lever so that only one person on another track is killed. From there, he wonders about the possibility of fixed ethics settings, created by manufacturers, versus user-adjustable ethics settings that, for example, allow a driver to prioritize his own safety over others, or prioritize the safety of children over that of the elderly.

Lin admits that the examples are outrageous in order to stress the point of the question. Still, it's worth a read because we already have cars that can make driving decisions, and it might not be long before "Five-Mode Adjustable Prime Directive" shows up on the options sheet. Head over to Wired to read the full piece.

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non issue. self driving cars will have relatively simple rules and will make no precise decision about complex ethical dilemmas and will thus be exonerated by its 'ignorance' should such a super rare situation occur. it's the shit happens school of legal thought.

only later will AI potentially be put in charge or complex decision making but likely never in cars.

'Google’s driverless cars have been given permission to break the speed limit by 10mph admits the head of the search company’s autonomous car project – but only by software engineers, not the police.

Dmitri Dolgov, the project's lead software engineer,told Reuters during a recent test drive that it would be safer for Google's cars to keep up with traffic when it was slightly exceeding the speed limit than to rigidly stick to it and cause an obstruction.

But this ability to speed has been restricted to 10mph over the speed limit, he said'